Tuesday, April 13, 2010

This comic, I will begrudgingly admit, isn't so bad. Maybe it's my desire to not write too much plus the knowledge that this post is already late, but I don't know- I haven't seen this joke done anywhere else, nor does it strike me as super easy and super obvious. In other words, I didn't say to myself "well who HASN'T thought of that idea when finding a plane seat online?"

That said, I still think it could be improved: Turn panel 4 into a thought bubble and then add a panel five where the joke is that the computer has a sarcastic response, along the lines of "very funny, nerd, you must think you are SO CLEVER." Obvious joke: subverted! Self-loving nerd: shot down (metaphorically)!

Carl, I'm glad you didn't comment on the scarf, because while it's not particularly fashionable on the ground, and it's not particularly functional in the air, it serves the vital purpose of keeping that poor woman's head from floating off her body altogether.

@ Harrison: Scarves are fashionable, for any modern definition of "fashion". Anyway, I won't start a debate over that, I'm just here to point out that Wednesday's comic (complaining about incorrect use of computer terminology) spells URL URI in the alt text. The hypocrisy is funnier than any XKCD in months.

Also, I'mma just copypasta my posts about 727 from the redundant MSPA thread into this one, because I am as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore, and so on.

I can't read it as poking fun at the guy, because:

(a) he's a programmer, which I guess contributes to the joke slightly in that programmers actually use both forward and backslashes. But it's not like Randall usually cares about giving his characters any motivation, or any actual character traits, so I suspect that's mostly just to make him sympathetic to the audience.

(b) the alt text presents the exact same viewpoint as the guy, completely straight. There's not even a joke apart from "Seriously, backslashes in URLs are so wrong, guys. Really, just so wrong."

Honestly, in my eyes this is the EXACT SAME COMIC as 725, except the grammar Nazi was weird and crazy and this guy is cool and awesome.

Grammar Nazi: Overreacts to someone correcting his grammar. Poochie the Programmer (as I will call him, because he is obviously half Joe Camel and a third Fonzarelli): Overreacts to people confusing forward slash and backslash.

Grammar Nazi: Follows people around for years waiting for them to screw up. Poochie the Programmer: Fabricates false credentials to bitch at people on live television.

I mean, this is about as much information as we get, so I don't see how we reach the conclusions:

The answer, of course, is that Randall has become (or, worse, perhaps always was) a total hack who doesn't give a shit about characterization or consistency of tone or, really, anything. If he can slap it together in half an hour and his fans beg for a t-shirt and try to put it on Wikipedia, he's happy.

URI is a more general term than URL, and stands for Uniform Resource Indicator. It's not a misspelling.

I'm too lazy to copy and paste my posts about 727 but honestly it's just "Jesus Christ Randall when your setup was done funnier two decades ago in a newspaper comic maybe it's time to pack it in. Especially when this happens repeatedly over the span of a few days."

Anon 11;11: Scarves that extend radially outward to, I dunno, five times your waist circumference are not, have not, and never will be in fashion. Particularly when you are, by all appearances, otherwise completely nekkid.

I mean, I get that it's there for the visual in the last panel, but it ends up looking ridiculous in panel 2 (if it were any longer it would look like a fuckin' cape) and causes me to idly speculate on whether this is the xkcdverse floaty-head version of Mina Harker. 'Sall in good fun, though; this comic can do much worse than make me reminisce about good times with Alan Moore.

now, out of curiosity, would it be really cliche and a bad joke if instead of the the screen saying "very funny, NERD" wouldn't it be oh so clever for it to say something like "I can't let you do that, NAME INPUT AT BEGINNING" I mean, then the nerd gets a nice reference instead.

Yeah I know, that is an awful idea, I still liked my original idea of it being a thought bubble instead of it actually happening because either or, as long as you take away the 3rd panel of her actually pressing the cockpit we still understand what she chose and Randall isn't walking us through his jokes like we're 5 year olds

@Femalethoth: Is it really that URI is more general? I thought (based on reading his book) that URI was what Tim Berners-Lee wanted it called, as opposed to what everyone wound up calling it (URL). I think a URI was supposed to identify content regardless of how you managed to get your content up, with the idea being to avoid having to redirect people to "your new page", while the URL locates content based on things that are more realistic (such as purchasing domain names). I.e., I got the impression Berners-Lee was a bit too idealistic, so the URL became the more common name. But it's been about ten years, and maybe I've forgotten...

Well, you're wrong because the alt-text of your image misspells "plane" as "place", but other than that, I have no major complaints. I do agree with the people who said that this comic was pretty decent as is, though.

I actually think the comic has one panel too many. Humour is better the less it's explained. Try taking out the third panel entirely, maybe replacing it with a repeat of the second panel - doesn't it work so much better now?

Carl, your example of how to improve this comic demonstrates a bias that makes me wonder how you ever started reading this comic in the first place. Do you really believe this comic would be funnier if the punchline were that "Hey, you can't actually choose the pilot's seat."? It seems to me that what you would have enjoyed in such a comic is having a nerd be disappointed by reality, and if that's true, how on earth did you ever bother to start reading xkcd, where one of the central themes of the comic is "wouldn't it be nice if nerds got their way?"?

Despite the fact that you didn't actually criticize this comic much, the fact that you suggested changing it to make it much, much worse just to put down the nerd mentality really shows how ill-suited you are to the task of critiquing a comic with the kind of themes xkcd uses.

I did like this one - the background in panel 2 could so easily have been left out, but wasn't. I do agree with those saying a panel reordering (I'd suggest 2-1-4) could have given it a bit more punch. Hell, the joke works with just 1-4, but 2's a nice establisher.

@Michael: URI is more general. There are two kind of URIs: URN (Uniform Resource Names) and URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). An URL is always a URI, but a URI is not always a URL, hence URI is more general. :)

Also, I cannot remember ever hearing anybody make this mistake on TV or anywhere else. I Randall complaining about a problem that actually exists or did he just make one up?

I finally figured out why Randall decided on xkcd. I expect I'm rather behind the pack here. In hindsight it should have been obvious that just like every other part of the comic it came from his obsession with genitalia. dckx, backwards, random, sexual humor with no subtlety perfectly describes a great deal of his comics.

On the other hand, this one made me laugh. Number 727 however is a formulaic, played out complaint.

I've never heard a newscaster or television presenter use the word 'backslash' when reading out web addresses. It is either 'slash' or 'forward slash', the former of which, granted, does throw up potential confusion and is more worthy a target of nerd rage than this complete and utter non-issue.

> I've never heard a newscaster or television presenter use the word 'backslash' when reading out web addresses.

That's what I was saying. I have heard James May on Top Gear repeated use "forward stroke", which could be mildly confusing I guess. But then, since he (and the other presenters) also (intentionally) refers to such sites as "Myface" and "FaceTube" you can hardly expect full accuracy from him. :)

What a ridiculous, boring comic, today's is. Firstly, how on Earth is a guy simply able to "lie" TV companies and make them believe you're a doctor in economics? Either the programmer guy is a TRUE GENIUS (yuck), or the TV company is really incompetent (hee). The comic simply treats either options as IRRELEVANT, instead of playing them further. And what *is* the point of the comic? "I am a PROGRAMMER, therefore COOL, and I have an IMPORTANT THING to say, which is completely QUIRKY and OFF-TOPIC, therefore FUNNY, and I will explain that IMPORTANT THING very blandly and without wit. Cue LAUGH TRACK."

Shit, what *is* the deal? If the idea is to poke fun at assorted errors on TV, wouldn't it be better if the Cool Programmer Dude actually ACTED like he was a doctor, and made his "backslash" complaint as if it were absolutely relevant to the topic at hand? It would still have been Gary Stu-ish and annoying, but at least not SO BORING.

As far as Carl's bad suggestion, I have to say that I think it's a half hearted attempt to find something wrong with the comic when he couldn't see anything wrong. So he thought "Well, I could always point out how pretentious the DCKS crowd is." And that's true, they really are that pretentious, even if that suggestion would make for a horrible comic.

Here's what's wrong with the comic, though- It's not funny. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's just not funny. "Hey, what if instead of clicking a passenger seat, I clicked the pilot seat? And then it actually worked?" Okay, interesting idea, but not really that funny. It could be a good set up for a comic, but it's not funny in itself. There's just no real punchline or anything like that. Unless you count "wooo" and a picture of someone in the seat she just clicked (big surprise there) as a punchline. Which I don't.

Firstly: comic 726 was pretty good. I'm wondering as well if Randall just added that scarf as a desperate move to hide his horrible detached stickpeople heads, but I digress. It might be better without that third panel, but, Carl, it surely wouldn't be better if that was just her imagination and, in fact, it was not possible to chose the pilot's seat. In fact, that'd be as unfunny as possible. Just because it's a subversion it doesn't make it funny, you must know.

Anyway, newest comic. Wait a second...

Wow. There are at least THREE things wrong with this.

1) The setup doesn't lead to the punchline. In fact, the punchline doesn't even have a coherent setup to it. That's because...

2) I'm not even sure there's a punchline. This is like a "the more you know" moment, out of nowhere and barely bearing any connection with the rest of the comic. It's not funny. It's just one more comic pandering to a share of Randall's audience, those "ISTP" fans or whatever that care if the punctuation comes in or outside the quotes. Bah.

3) And finally the art. "Oh, but this is a stick figure comic, art is not a criticizable point!" YES IT IS WHEN IT GETS IN THE WAY OF THE COMIC! Look at that, can you tell who's the host and who's the guest? No wonder they didn't figure the guy wasn't a trade expert, they probably just got the wrong guy in! The problem, once again, is that Randall is trying to make a comic that'd work, say, in SMBC, but turns out inappropriately crude when you draw it with stick figures. In other words: he's been working with stick figures for five years or so and still didn't manage to know what works well with the style and what doesn't.

The joke here seems to be "what if you really could pick the pilot seat on those seat selector screens?" If that's it, the punchline is given away in frame 3.

If Randall had wanted to go with the traditional unfunny geek chic, he would have changed the "click" in frame 3 to "click! click! click!" with someone in frame 4 explaining "sir, you can't pick the pilot's seat".

That's what I expected when I saw frame 3, some geek acting in a traditional geek manner, then some square dumping on his geeky fun.

I was booking a flight a few months ago with Air New Zealand. During seat selection I noticed that there were a couple of seats in the cockpit, the same colour as the available seats elsewhere on the plane. Hmm... so I moved the mouse over and it lit up and the cursor changed, so I clicked it. It just displays a javascript alert box saying, "You can't sit there!". Dang.

Gave me a chuckle at the time, far more than this comic managed to elicit.

My problem with this comic is that there's not really a joke. She did something she wasn't supposed to and now she's endangering other people's lives. It doesn't make any sense either, obviously the computer won't just literally assign you to anyplace you ask, there are some restrictions.

I know some people enjoy these types of jokes (do something weird, get rewarded for thinking outside the box).

Carl, as a number of people have said before me, your suggestion unfortunately isn't as good as the comic itself. In fact, it's sort of an example of "over-explaining the joke", which is what you rag on Munroe for.

Carl, I think you're contradicting Rob's recent rant, "You Wouldn't Admit It Even If You Did Like One!"

Yes, you "admit" that it's "decent" but you do it so begrudgingly and sheepishly, like you're afraid of giving it any sort of real praise. It's not a perfect comic but it's definitely a lot better than any of the latest xkcd strips.

What is this "almost 20 years" Randall refers to in the alt text of 727? Is it supposed to be the length of time that TV newscasters have been mentioning URLs? Nobody had heard of the internet in 1990; while the Internet as a whole started getting some media coverage in 1995, I doubt specific URLs were mentioned regularly before 1997. 13-15 years isn't almost 20. Or is it supposed to be almost 20 years since people stopped regularly seeing backslashes in Windows directory paths? Again, Windows 95 came out 15 years ago, and people were still using the MS-DOS prompt in Win 95 for several years after that.

And I've never heard a forward slash mistakenly called a backslash, and this is the same comic as 725 or 558.

The comic is mirthful, but to be funny, panel 5 should be a long shot of the plane crashing into the ground and bursting into flames. Of course, that would make it into a artistically-unambitious Perry Bible Fellowship, but the only potential comedy I see in this story is black.

Anon 8:17 that's a pretty passive way to show his appreciation, especially after saying things like "I will begrudgingly admit, isn't so bad" and blaming it on a sudden laziness or apathy towards updating the blog.

I don't even know what that guy is talking about. The only time I've ever heard someone use the word "backslash" in a URL was for the joke which goes something like "OJ Simpson has a new website, found at www.\\esc"

If I did hear someone describe a slash incorrectly I'd be annoyed too. If it was a phenomenon it would be worth commenting on, because a backslash is very much distinct from a forward slash and it's not like we don't have both on a keyboard.

On the matter of this comic, I did say before it was good, but I'd just like to say one more thing. Look at panel four. Either:

1: Randall does not know what direction gravity goes in.2: Randall does not know that you only get a backards force when accelerating, and not just when moving really fast.3: Randall didn't fail secondary school physics and did work for NASA, and knows those two points. But ignored them anyway for the sake of the audience.In other words:Randal thinks his audience are morons.

Also, 727 is the exact same joke as 725. Only with more fanbase pandering.GG, next map.

Ken, don't be stupid. The payoff is that it actually worked- and the ante is upped by showing that she's even piloting the plane. Without a panel showing the area being clicked on it would be unclear that she managed it by clicking a greyed out area (as opposed to, say, deciding against using the system and bribing a flight attendant instead.) Without a panel showing her actually in the cockpit it would be unclear that it worked and would look like she was just making a silly joke to herself.

Maybe there ought to be two guards coming up to her asking her to come this way, she is worried, and it turns out the pilot is sick, she is hurried into the cockpit, and the co-pilot asks her to take off... she looks confused and bewildered, and says "But I don't know how to fly!"

The co-pilot replies "Good lord! Only registered pilots can take that seat!"

Next panel: "Not so funny now is it? We're sick of you people clicking on that seat."

"Of course, that would make it into a artistically-unambitious Perry Bible Fellowship, but the only potential comedy I see in this story is black."

I sort of agree. I think xkcd made me absolutely jaded and sick of that "idealistic", starry-eyedchildish wonder Randall tries to preach. It seriously gets on my nerves, because it looks too forced and fake.

Except this comic strip is a universe where what is geekiest, works best. There's no surprise... AT ALL... that it works. No dissonance between what you expect at the end of panel 3, and what you see in panel 4. Which results in there being no joke.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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